


In the Flames of Forgiveness

by IrLaimsaAraLath



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Character Death, F/M, NSFW, Sex, Violence, lots of death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-16
Updated: 2017-10-16
Packaged: 2019-01-18 02:37:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,711
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12379143
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IrLaimsaAraLath/pseuds/IrLaimsaAraLath
Summary: So, @solverne posted this quote:  "He set fire to the world around him, but never let a flame touch her."  She said it reminded her of post-Trespasser Solas.  Then, she said, "Dragon Age 4: In which Solas tries to remain smooth and acts like he never took her arm, but Lavellan is still ready to give him an ass-kicking before forgiving him."And I said, just save time and kick his ass, forgive him, and screw him all at the same time.Then she wanted to read it.Aaaaaand, people died.Sry not sry.





	In the Flames of Forgiveness

**Author's Note:**

> Challenge accepted.

The blackness behind her closed eyelids consumed her vision, and yet, no sight seen had ever been more vivid.  A battlefield lay blanketed by smoke, acrid and coppery, stirred only by the breaths and moans of the dying.  Gold and crimson on the horizon, the sun painted the plumes pale, opaque enough to make monstrous cloudy beasts of the shrouded carts and horses and elves that were propped and discarded like the cast off toys of an angry god.  An angry goddess.  She took a breath, pulling into herself the ashen remnants of flames, the last breaths of the countless, the screams of fury now no more than sighs that had left their passion in the ground at her feet.  Sodden and slick with blood.  

 

She lifted her chin and opened her eyes, the viridian lit from behind by an ephemeral incandescence that spoke of force, Fade, and the white-hot flash of lightning.  Everything she had known was gone, everyone she loved dead.  Skyhold existed as a crumbled ruin, her strongholds in Emprise du Lion, Crestwood, and the Western Approach treated much the same.  In the end, she could place the blame for none of it at any feet but her own.  It had taken her hobbled Inquisition an unfortunately long time to find him, but once they did, she pursued the Dread Wolf with an unslakable passion.  

 

She would oft find battles raging, the clang of swords and the whistle of arrows the percussion in a violent war song.  However, as soon as she waded into the fray, his forces would quit the field and retreat.  Tactically, it made less than no sense at all.  In compensation, she adjusted her strategy; she maneuvered her armies to corral his, to force a skirmish.  Even then, some laid down their arms rather than fight, while the others warred on with a stunning accuracy that would fell the soldiers to her left and right and leave she herself untouched.  It wasn’t until the Wolf himself one day joined his army on the field that she truly understood.

 

Their forces stood in formation at opposite ends of the field, while they met in the middle ground.  He was just as she remembered him from the Crossroads, the pelt over his shoulder a defiant accessory against his Elvhen armor and his arms fixed at the wrists behind his back.  “Ma vhenan,” he said when they came to stand but a spare few feet apart, “You look well.”  The arcane sword in her hand hummed, its tip hissing against the dirt.  Her missing arm had been replaced by something very much like the sword:  a willing spirit bound to a prosthetic silverite plate fused to the bone, just beneath the skin.  It wove her power into a limb of pure energy.  At her whim, it was as solid as she required or as dangerous as she needed.

 

“I think you are too generous, Solas,” she said in return, purposefully using his name in lieu of an endearment.  He’d taken her heart and returned it broken.  He’d stolen her arm and left her without.  She would likely never cease to love him, but she need not confess that aloud to him or anyone else.  “This could end here.  It is not yet too late,” she suggested, knowing all the while what his answer would be.  His head shook slowly as his grey-blue eyes turned to squint up at the sky.  “The hour has grown much too late to reverse course.  I will see this done,” he replied, eventually tilting his gaze down to hers.

 

“You know I will always be here, at your heel, chasing until one of us is dead,” she warned, the sadness in her voice a shade that haunted her eyes and had more than already made a dessicated ruin of her soul.  “I will await the day I can run from you no longer.  On that day, I will gladly offer you my neck so that you may end my misery,” he replied, unbothered by her threat in the slightest.  The twist that pinched in her heart cracked her mask, and she took a step closer.  She saw his nose lift subtly into the air as he took a deep breath of her scent.  “Why must it be this way, Solas?  End this.  Be with me,” she said in a hush, a desperate plea that made her body cry to reach out, to touch him.  He only smiled, an expression as grey and forlorn as ever she had seen on his lips.  “In another life, perhaps.  Ir abelas, vhenan.  I have stolen enough of your time,” he finished, turning his back on her and returning the way he’d come.  The air distorted around him, and he Fade stepped from the field, and his forces turned to withdraw.  

 

She understood then why his men never attempted to strike her, why they fell easily before her without fighting, why they quit the field rather than engage.  He wouldn’t allow them to kill her.  The thought of it had made her laugh then.  A god on the path to rending the world asunder, and he was going to spare one Dalish elf from death.  He, of course, would consume her in the end; if not by sword or arrow or magic, then when the world fell apart, she would perish with it.  Until then, however, she planned to dog his steps in and out of the Fade until one or the other of them submitted.  But, as time drew on, those around her began to fall.  Her advisors, her friends.  One by one.

 

In desperation, unable to bear the thought of further losses, she had appealed to Mythal with Abelas’s aid.  The vessel that arrived was different when she last met the goddess, but there was no question of her identity.  Niyera bartered with anything and everything she had for the power to stop the Dread Wolf, but the ancient stopped her short.  She could not spare so great an amount of her power; her own last meeting with Fen’harel had left her somewhat bereft.  What she did offer, however, was to give Niyera her own power, to raise her up as she had Solas.  That wasn’t so much a passing of power as turning a key in an invisible lock.  There had been only one condition, and she’d seen the regret in Abelas’s eyes when she accepted, trading all she had been to become something she was never meant to be.

 

In time, even her Sentinel had fallen to the Wolf’s armies.  Her lover died in her arms, and she was left in a crater hollowed by the ferocity of her grief, everything in sight blackened or vaporized.  She may have had the power of a goddess, but not the years of learning control.  Her magic was wild, her tactics unpredictable, and her vengeance fierce and without mercy.  The culmination of it had brought her here, right to the gates of the Dread Wolf’s domain.  For as long as they could, her companions had followed her, but death claimed them until only she was left.  

 

She’d driven his forces to their furthest retreat, and even then, they’d fought only to defend themselves, never striking her.  Under her blade, wrapped in her magic, or in her hand, they all perished.  She strode among their bodies, boots sinking into the blood-soaked ground of the path that led to his fortress.  Her foot upon the first marble step took the guards to their knees, heads bowed, and she pushed through the towering doors and into the vestibule.  Sentries posted fell one by one in  genuflexion as she passed them by.

 

With the quickening of her heartbeat, her breaths came faster, and her helm became stifling.  She tugged it from her head and dropped it as she walked, and a wrist-thick braid of white fell down her back.  Every elf in her presence took a knee as she made her way through the maze of his fortress as if she’d walked the halls countless times.  The only resistance she met was a pack of pitch black wolves, and they were simply acting according to their nature.  She could hardly fault them that.  A raised hand paralyzed them in place, one in mid-leap even, and she removed her gauntlets to stroke its coarse fur as she passed.  After the gauntlets went the pauldrons and the vambraces, and the bits and pieces of her armor were left like a trail of breadcrumbs back to the beginning.

 

Regardless of how this ended, she would have no further use for armor.  She only paused outside the doors to his inner sanctum, and as she took a deep breath, violet-white threads of energy crackled over her eyes.  Looking to each of the guards in turn, she commanded with a low thrumming in her voice, “Drop your weapons, and leave,” and they obeyed, metal clattering to the floor before they filed out.  Bending, she retrieved the two longswords before squaring her shoulders.  Force emanated from her body, and the doors opened, the wood creaking as they folded inward on heavy hinges.  The sound of her boots on the marble echoed through the chamber, accompanied only by the hiss of the fires burning in the braziers lining the walk.  

 

Solas was slouched in an impressive throne carved from the base of a massive tree, its natural gnarled lines preserved and accented with lupine skulls.  His legs were splayed, an elbow propped on the arm, and his fingers pressed into his forehead.  “That was quite the display,” he mused, turning his head from his hand to rest his chin on his knuckles.  “Who lent you that power, I wonder.”  As she strode along, webs of electricity sheathed her right arm, and the other flickered from dim gold to pale violet.  When the power filled her to the point of leaking from her eyes in trails of sooty mist and pale arcs of energy, Solas sat a little straighter and leaned forward.

 

“No.”  A single word fell from his lips, and for once, he displayed an expression of genuine surprise.  It shifted from shock, to anger, then to sorrow as he stood and stepped down from the dais to meet her.  “What did you do, vhenan?” he whispered hoarsely, his final demeanor some mixture of all three.  Throwing down the swords, the harsh sound echoed around them, and she gave him a full, if sorrowed, smile.  She had taken great pains to hide this from him.  It was a dangerous game of subterfuge that ended in many lives lost.  Try as she might to avoid overt displays, from time to time, one of his spies would witness something they shouldn’t.  They had to be dispatched.  She had to learn quickly how to keep the knowledge hidden even in the Fade, but the Well’s voices helped with that.

 

“Only what I needed to,” she answered, and the vibration in her voice was carried on waves of energy that prickled over his skin and made him suck in a sharp breath.  “I told you once before, Solas.  Whatever it took…”  They stood barely two arm’s lengths away from each other, but he was the first to move, closing the distance between them.  His eyes panned over her form, searching both for the things that had changed and the things that had not, and he looked as tense as she felt.  When he lifted a hand toward her face, all she wanted to do was lean into his touch, fall into his arms, be comforted by the warmth she knew she’d find against him.  Instead, she closed her eyes and turned away from his hand.  

 

“Don’t,” she uttered, letting the silence hang between them for a time before she met his gaze once more.  “Niyera, you were not born for this power.  In time, it will consume you and kill you,” he said, a subtle tremor chasing his voice.  “I’m aware,” she responded, and beneath the white glare of the energy in her eyes, tears had begun to well.  Gingerly, she settled a hand at the center of his chest; the metal of his armor was warm to the touch, and she could feel his heartbeat.  As she traced the edge of her thumb along the etching on his breastplate, a single tear cleared a streak down her dirt and blood-stained cheek.

 

“But, I’ll live long enough to finish what I came here for,” and her words had no sooner passed her lips than she unleashed a torrent of energy that traveled down her arm, through her hand, and into his chest.  Taken off-guard, his barrier failed to fully form in time to deflect the blow, and he took the brunt of the force head on.  Craggy arcs of lightning forked from her hand, lifting him airborne, and a twist and thrust of her arm slammed him against the wall behind his throne.  The impact made the marble crack, and Solas bonelessly slid down the wall.  As if punched in the gut, her breath left her in a rush, a silent heave of a sob that stung in the center of her chest and doubled her over.  

 

She had never imagined this would be easy, but she’d mistakenly thought she had no tears left to shed, the shattered pieces of her heart too small to bleed.  How wrong she had been.  She staggered toward him, siphoning her power to manifest fitful orbs of energy in her palms as she watched thin fingers of smoke curl up from his body.  He groaned as he lifted his head and gingerly probed at his breastplate.  A ragged hole was torn through the metal, shearing jagged fangs that bent inward and into his flesh.  He fidgeted with the straps securing his breastplate, releasing the buckles to let it fall to the floor and found the padding and tunic beneath had been burned through.  

 

His head canted loosely upward to glance at her as his fingers drew tendrils of healing magic across his chest to close the seeping wounds.  Bracing a hand on the arm of the throne, he pushed himself to his feet, and with a pain-roughed voice said, “This is not necessary, vhen-.”  She didn’t allow him to finish before she hurled a sphere of tightly coiled lightning at him, which he was ready for and deflected.  The force broke against a nearby statue, shattering the stone and dusting the air.  She wasted no time, hurling another sphere as she stalked toward him.  This one, he caught as his eyes flared silver, the energy shaped and molded by the caress of his hands until it was no more than a glimmering speck of light that winked out between his palms.

 

“Niyera, please,” he entreated, holding his hands up in concession as he continued toward her.  Watching her magic dwindle to nothing under his touch wrested a raw cry from her throat, and her eyes narrowed to slits as she suddenly found the hilt of her arcane sword in her hand.  The blade flared to life with a sibilant whisper, and she inscribed an arc upon the air as she struck out at him.  He barely managed to move out of range, and the blade tip tore through his tunic with a hiss and the scent of singed wool.  Every spell she cast, every stroke of her sword broke another little piece of her away, and she felt herself crumbling.  “Fight back, damn you!” she howled at him, driving him back with each humming slash of her sword.  Her skin was scalding, her eyes burning as her tears coursed down her cheeks and dripped from her chin.

 

He had resorted to concentrated blades of force to fight off her attacks, parrying each blow until she had him trapped in the corner of the chamber.  From high over her head, she brought a final strike down at him, but an iridescent shield cast from the cradle of his hands thickened the air and arrested its descent.  She gnashed her teeth with the effort to press through the barrier, and it was beginning to give way when one hand abandoned the shield and slung a fist of pure force at her.  It connected at the base of her sternum, and she was thrown back.

 

Before the hilt of her sword clattered to the floor, he was on her, having Fade stepped through the distance between.  The weight of his body rested on his hands as they pinned her shoulders to the marble, and her legs were trapped beneath his.  Her eyes were wide with fury and breathlessness, and she struggled to take a gulp of air.  If she hadn’t already had the wind knocked out of her, the look on his face would have stolen her breath.  His eyes were red and welling, the weariness she saw there paling in comparison to the torture that darkened his gaze to the hue of a thunderhead.

 

“W-why will you not fight back?” she all but sobbed at him as she struggled to free herself, but he held fast, the muscles over his jaws clenched and twitching with the effort.  “I cannot,” he managed to say through the thickness of his voice, “I will not.”  She bowed the line of her back as she tilted her head back, the tense coil of her muscles straining against him.  “Why?” she forced from between her teeth, and she was answered only with silence until she could no longer maintain her fight and sagged back to the floor.  Anguished, she drug her eyes back to his.

 

“Because I-,” he paused, easing his weight from her shoulders slightly, and when she didn’t fight, he shifted his hands to the floor at each side of her head.  Bowing, he pressed his forehead to hers and whispered between his harried breaths, “Ar lath ma, vhenan.”  There was so much, too much, she was torn too many ways, and she shattered beneath him.  She tried to hide her sobbing behind her hand, and when he pulled her fingers away, she turned her head.  His light grip on her chin turned her face back to his; her tears had cleaned paths from the corners of her eyes back into her hairline and ran trails down her cheeks.  Every breath caught in her chest as she stared up at him, and his hand was trembling when he cupped her jaw.  With an unsteady voice, he said, “ _ Mi’nas’sal’inan _ .  May I kiss you...just once more?”

 

She found it impossible to speak and nodded instead.  His lips fell trembling to hers, the barest touch that tendered as it deepened, slow caresses that passed a single breath between them.  The years melted away, the edges of the tragedies smoothed, and she decided without any real conscious thought that he was the only balm that would ever truly soothe her.  In his chest, his breath hitched, and he began to withdraw, but her hand rose along his shoulder to the nape of his neck, forcefully pulling him back into the kiss.  The low groan of his acquiescence parted her lips beneath his, and he drank more deeply of her as he lowered to rest his weight on one forearm.  She lost herself in the taste of him on her tongue, in the familiar but long absent weight of his body against hers.  

 

His fingers found their way to her hair and slipped into the loose strands behind her ear, nails light on her scalp. She felt weightless, her head spinning with exertion, power, and desperate need.  The press of his mouth on hers muffled her moan, and her hand slipped from his neck to tangle in the fabric of his tunic.   With her other hand on his waist, she pulled him into her, urgently bucking between the legs that pinned hers.  His need couldn't have been more obvious, and the sound he made could only be described as a growl.  Nipping at her lips as he went, he wrenched out of the kiss to stare down at her.  They were both breathless, lips swollen and parted.  He silently begged the question, and there was no mistaking the answer in her eyes or her hands as her fingers slid from his hip to the laces trapping his length against his body. 

 

From there, it was all a frenzy of snatching hands, torn seams, and the awkward divesting of leggings.  Everything came acutely back into focus, however, when he settled between her thighs, hitched one leg to his hip with a hand beneath her knee, and rocked into her in one devastatingly smooth motion.  Her spine arched, and they shared a moan that echoed off the walls of the otherwise vacant chamber.  The sting of his sudden occupation pulled a hiss from between her teeth, but it was soon lost in the chorus of moans that colored her every shuddering breath.  His mouth had fallen to her neck, lips and teeth and tongue tasting sweat-salted skin.  She'd long since abandoned her hold on his tunic to instead go beneath it, fingers and nails clawing for purchase on his back.  Her legs circled his waist, thighs riding on his hips, gripping with each snap of his body into hers.  

 

Every nerve in her body was alight, fierce and all-consuming; she wanted to crystallize this moment.  Freeze time and hold them here forever.   Because in this moment, there was no Dread Wolf and no Inquisitor.  There was only Solas and Niyera, with all of their love and all of their passion and all of their faults.  So perfectly flawed, and yet the way they fit together made them whole.  She barely noticed when tears began to slip from the corners of her eyes; she was too absorbed in the sound of her name on his lips as he panted against her shoulder.   Too distracted by the tightness that had begun to grip her.  

 

Solas slid a cradling hand between the back of her head and the marble floor as he adjusted the angle of his body so that every stroke hit just right to turn her moans into wanton cries.  Her heels dug harshly into the backs of his thighs, leverage to meet every thrust as he fell into her again and again.  Electricity crawled up her spine and across her scalp as the pressure seated low in her body reached a crescendo, and her climax crashed into her.  Behind her eyes, everything went white for a moment, and her head rocked back into his hand, lips perched silently on her pleasure until a core-deep shudder consumed her from head to toe.  Then, she screamed:  his name, her love, words that meant everything and nothing.  His voice was a constant rumble in her ear of benedictions composed of her name and praises, though when she felt him go rigid beneath her hands, within her, it transformed into a raw growl and tenebrous moans.  Both were muffled against her shoulder, and her arms enfolded him, rocked him, teasing from his body every last bit he had to give.

 

When he collapsed atop her, she clung to him, legs and arms wrapped tight.  His brushed breathless kisses up her neck to her ear, and her heart broke all over again when she heard him whisper, “Forgive me.”  He repeated it, each utterance more desperate than the last, until she finally answered, “I forgive you.”  She felt the tension ease from his back, and his face pressed tightly into the hollow of her shoulder.  Her heart in her chest pounded so fiercely against her ribs that she feared it might break through, and she closed her eyes.  “Solas...vhenan, look at me,” she pleaded, and he pulled back just enough to meet her gaze.  When she cupped his face in her hands, they were trembling violently.  Shaky thumbs brushed over his cheeks as she let her eyes roam over his, and all was silent about them but for the scrape of metal on stone.

 

“Ar lath ma.  Tell me you forgive me,” she begged, voice strained and cracking.  Confusion stole over his eyes, “But y-,” and she shook his face lightly to silence him.  “For once, please, just do as I ask.  Tell me you forgive me.”  The look on his face told her there was little he could deny her at this moment, and his voice was barely more than a whispered breath when he said, “I forgive you.”  Her breath left her all at once, and she tugged him down.  “Now kiss me.”  He didn’t need to be asked a second time, and his mouth fell to hers in a kiss both tender and deep, reverent and consuming.  One hand slipped from his face, and over his shoulder, she made a beckoning motion with her fingers.

 

The sound of metal slamming into marble was the first thing that registered.  The second was the stiffness of his body as it tensed atop her.  The third was pain:  physical as the swords fell first through his back, into her, then buried into the marble beneath them, and emotional, as his eyes met hers as he lifted his head from the kiss.  Her hands held his face, and she forced herself not to look away from his gaze.  “V-vhenan,” was the only utterance he made, and she felt the heat of her tears trailing into her hairline as she whispered, “I’m sorry.  I’m so sorry,” over and over again.  A trail of blood seeped from the corner of his mouth, and when he reached up to touch her cheek, his fingers left smears of red.

 

A crackling of silver and dark smoke glazed his eyes, obscuring the grey-blue she so loved, and his body twitched violently a few times before his head became dead weight in her hands.  The utterly destroyed and anguished cry that left her was only dampened by a cough that painted blood on her own lips, and she gently laid his head to rest on her shoulder.  From around her neck, she snatched away the amulet Mythal had given her, breaking the chain.  The brush of her thumb over its faceted surface brought the magic to life, and as at last the power departed the Dread Wolf’s body, it was absorbed into the artifact.  

 

As the pool of their blood spread across the marble beneath them, she felt herself growing weaker, and darkness began to claw at the corners of her vision.  With her last few breaths, she willed the amulet away, back into its owner’s hands, with a single message:  Make it right.  Discharged of her duty and cradling the body of the one she loved most in the world, the light ebbed from her eyes.  Would his death halt the destruction of the world?  Could it?  Did it matter?  It hadn’t to her.  She died where she had always wanted to live:  in his arms.

 

* * *

 

In Mythal’s hand, the amulet whispered a bittersweet song:  one of love and loss, violence and the best of intentions.  Her finger smeared the blood on its surface, and she heard a voice in her mind, “Make it right.”  The ancient nodded, closed her fingers about the amulet, and disappeared.

 

* * *

 

Perched atop the cradle of his fingers, Solas regarded the orb with a measure of disdain.  He could not open it.  His power was not yet recovered enough.  With a sigh of resignation, he motioned to the elf standing at attention nearby, and as his neared, the Dread Wolf said, “Take this and deliv-.”  His words were cut off by a roar like that of a tornado, punctuated by crackles of lightning as a portal spun into being behind the elven soldier.  A pale hand appeared on the elf’s shoulder, and he dropped like a sack of potatoes.  Solas was on his feet in an instant with a spell dancing on his fingertips.  The woman revealed when his agent fell was unknown to him; she appeared to be human, but there was something off.  Then she spoke, “My friend, this is a mistake I cannot allow you to make,” and the vibration in her voice was familiar, but confusing.  “Mythal?” 


End file.
